SWFTS program provides parallel management of external interfaces to the combat system and internal interfaces between subsystems within the combat system. In addition, to the complexity of configuration management, the SWFTS model is large. The combat system includes approximately:

35 subsystems from over 20 program offices,

2,500 interface requirements,

100 services,

3,700 model elements for interfaces,

More than 15,000 relationships between model elements,

500,000 model elements.

The scope of the SWFTS systems engineering efforts have increased over time with more parallel changes, more concurrent baselines, thus increasing the Engineering workload.

To handle complexity, increase productivity, and save costs, MBSE was adopted to manage SWFTS configurations. MBSE has been adopted for US NAVY submarines combat systems software and hardware configurations management.

The key issue in applying MBSE was efficiently representing system variation to the systems engineering of product families. This is important both to minimize duplicative data to be maintained and synchronized within the system models, and to minimize the conceptual complexity of the system model.

About Lockheed Martin (LMCO)

Lockheed Martin is a global security and aerospace company that employs about 116,000 people worldwide. The majority of its business is with the U.S. Department of Defense and the U.S. federal government agencies. It is the largest provider of IT services, systems integration, and training to the U.S. Government.

About Submarine Warfare Federated Tactical System (SWFTS)

SWFTS manages combat subsystem Interfaces and combat system I&T. This includes the logical network configuration data (e.g. IP addresses, protocols, node characteristics) and the data exchanges including requirements levied on subsystems for data origination and receipt, data types, protocols and more. It combines multiple subsystems from Multiple Program Offices and Vendors.

Solution

In order to manage growth, complexity, and demand for resources of mission critical systems, LMCO has transitioned to using MBSE large scale. The transition was very successful; but it also required adopting best practices along the way. MagicDraw provides real–life project capabilities (i.e. Smart packages) out of the box, which will provide further productivity and quality gains supporting configuration management approach.

To handle the task of dozens of product configurations managed in parallel, with many of those baselines being updated several times a year, LMCO developed a new SysML modeling technique.

It extends the concepts of libraries with SysML Catalogs to bound the complexity of the configuration task, improving the quality and efficiency of the systems engineering process. Catalogs frame alternative views of the model for the engineer. Usage of catalogs gives ability to utilize the catalog as an active filter of the model:

As shown in the figure, the approved subset of servers from the list of all servers is imported into a catalog for a specific baseline (TI10 or TI12 in the example). Similarly, these catalogs are populated with other hardware components approved for those baselines. Each catalog restricts the scope of the configuration to those components approved for the specific baseline.

Efficient management of the product configuration process is a challenge in the evolution of any industrial scale product family. The standards themselves are not addressing this problem in a scalable fashion. In addition, existing UML/SysML modeling tool support for variation points was vital.

Challenge

Manage the complexity faced by systems engineers

Manage high variability between platforms

Maximize reuse between baselines

Improve the quality and efficiency of the baseline configuration process

Cameo Systems Modeler is a Model-Based Systems Engineering (MBSE) software enabling single users or an entire engineering team to create, collaborate, and manage systems requirements and designs. It's the most up-to-date and standards-compliant modeling software in the industry.

Cameo Simulation Toolkit provides the first in the industry extendible model execution framework based on OMG fUML and W3C SCXML standards. It extends Cameo Systems Modeler to validate system behavior by executing, animating, and debugging SysML State machine, Activity, and Parametric models in the context of realistic mock-ups of the intended user interface.

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